L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres (2013)

The City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize

Selected by Robert Lepage, Tenth Prize Laureate

Photo by Guillaume D. Cyr

Founded in Quebec City in 2002, LODHO is an artist run collective led by Bruno Bouchard, Gabrielle Bouthillier, Jasmin Cloutier, Simon Drouin, Simon Elmaleh and Danya Ortmann. The figure of the one-man band is emblematic of their philosophy in which the musician truly “struggles with his instrument” to create “visual music”. LODHO made its mark in 2005 with Performs Tom Waits, a production that manifests the group’s unique and iconoclastic artistic approach. It has been presented to great acclaim more than 150 times at major festivals and venues in Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France, Mexico, Ecuador, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, Germany and Canada. LODHO has created and toured seven other original works including three pieces for the stage and four street performances using antique trucks.

"Finding yourself out of your comfort zone is something extremely stimulating - that's exactly what L'orchestre d'hommes-orchestres does for you. Somewhere between music, poetry and visual performance, they create their own art form and you suddenly find yourself treading territories you never knew existed. They turn the ordinary into extraordinary, the expected into the unexpected, and noise into harmony. They are truly unique," said Robert Lepage.

"The City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize is given by the Laureate to an outstanding artist or collective who they believe embodies the qualities of creative promise, innovation and career potential demonstrated by Gould in his youth," said Brian Levine, Executive Director of The Glenn Gould Foundation. "We're absolutely delighted by Robert Lepage's selection of LODHO, whose work combines an absolutely unique combination of concert, carnival, cabaret, travelling medicine show and alternative reality. There's no one like them, anywhere."

"We are very honoured by the recognition Robert Lepage has shown towards our work by choosing us for this prize. The support of an artist whose achievements are so significant, makes us all the prouder of the artistic posture we've been advocating for 12 years: un-discipline, anonymity, confusion between current arts and popular cultures. So it is a great privilege to be rewarded for having followed all those invisible strings and created all these imperfect forms," said LODHO. "We want to share this award with all the people who have joined us, in a variety of ways, over time. LODHO is the meeting of a few people who have chosen to compose with a chaos of fertile contradictions, where the role distribution shifts and where we rarely find ourselves where we thought we would be. And today, we are here."